


Clopin's Illness

by College-Age Zanii (Zaniida)



Series: Amateur Hour [3]
Category: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)
Genre: Amateur Hour, Chronic Illness, Gen, I really loved the idea of gypsies (still do), Oh dear this was certainly written by teenage me, Old and Unlikely to Be Completed, Sorta Suicidal But Not Really?, Teenage Writing, and I wrote this all from a teenage Christian perspective so there's that too, but I've got zero understanding of their culture, mostly unedited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-21
Updated: 2018-04-24
Packaged: 2019-04-25 21:29:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14387481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zaniida/pseuds/College-Age%20Zanii
Summary: My first official fandom wasThe Hunchback of Notre Dame(Disney); within that fandom, I found one of my dearest friends throughout college (I was on the side of Clopin, he was on the side of Frollo, but we really hit it off and I'm sad that we lost touch).  My first published fics were HoND, and I posted them on my GeoCities and Angelfire sites; here is the one I got furthest on at the time, where I send Clopin on a journey he half expects to die from.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Shortly before college, around the time that I joined the internet*, I discovered fandoms, and HoND was the first that really attracted me. Now, I'd been writing fanfics (mostly in my head, some on paper) since I was at least an adolescent, but it was upon getting to this stage that I realized it was a common practice and it actually had a term associated with it.
> 
> *I took on the ident **Kilyle** , after my favorite character from a _Star Trek_ book, and it's remained my ident for a good twenty years and more; if you see a Kilyle online, it's more than likely me.
> 
> With HoND, I was very much interested in the gypsies, and pretty much not at all in anything else :P as far as creating my own, although I had a little bit of a plan for a mole-type character who was forced to work for Frollo and infiltrated the gypsy camp.
> 
> I had _plans_ for my HoND verse (not that I knew the term "verse" at the time). I created a list of characters and some ideas for stories, but only a tiny amount ever made it to paper (or, well, digital paper at least). I can recall three characters I made: Solange-Gael was (IIRC) an aging woman, middle-aged or older, a crotchety nurturer type, the kind who doesn't take crap from anyone. Julian, _quite_ possibly spillover from my crush on DS9's Julian Bashir, was a doctor with swarthy skin. And Ariel (Ari) was a young man full of bitterness and rage, keeping it all bottled in but showing a fierce face to the world, something like Raphael from the Turtles.
> 
> I have no idea who this "Maria" is, in this fic. I don't have much recollection of trying to give Clopin a love interest, though clearly I had _some_ plans in that vein. Apparently this is before the stage at which I started hating the name "Maria" as way too common ( _and_ it means "bitterness," why would you name your daughter that??). It's kinda amusing that one of my friends is a Maria, now.
> 
> My Clopin is clearly muddled with Gambit from the X-Men cartoon. I don't know how deliberate this was, but at the moment I find it highly amusing. My mental patterns of romance were formed around Gambit/Rogue and I still love them dearly.
> 
> As to plot and setting, well, this is one of many indications that I tend to storm right into possibilities without stopping to appreciate the canonical setting and how to adapt myself to that world. I think this was also around the time that I was designing text games like Choose-Your-Own-Adventures that had you tromping through fields like this; feels familiar. Anyway, "take the character out of their normal setting so I don't need to know anything about the normal setting to create the story" was an unfortunately common way for me to deal with this sort of thing. (I once ran a tabletop game for my friends by whisking them away to another planet so I didn't have to deal with modern city life and could indulge myself in fantasy tropes that really didn't suit the setup we had going at the time.)
> 
> My vague recollections of where I was going with this was "oh, this is how he meets this other group I've designed, y'know, the not!gypsies who are really quite like gypsies." Ah well. It also appears to be maybe patterned a little after _Clan of the Cave Bear_ ….

"So Frollo hasn't been moving at all for--”

Clopin broke into a coughing spell, interrupting the conversation for a good few minutes. Maria looked at him with worry clear in her eyes.

After the council was over, the group broke apart, each to their own concerns, and Maria approached her king and love.

"You're getting weaker, aren't you, Clopin?" she said, and it was not truly a question -- though her eyes begged that he tell her differently.

Lifting a gentle hand to her chin, he smiled. "Oui, Cherie, I grow weaker. It will not be long now, I think, before the telling day." He was fully ready to face the facts that his body was telling him. "Then I shall take the long walk… who knows whether we shall ever see each other again? Maybe I shall sit with you at the campfire again, maybe not. Does it matter?" His brow furrowed. "Our love has been a great passion to me, but all things end, Cherie, and this is no--"

"No!" she interrupted with anguish. "No -- you cannot leave -- you must not leave me! How will I go on -- what would I do without you?" She fell on him, weeping as though never to stop. He cuddled her head in his hands.

"Oh, Cherie, you will go on even without me. The long walk is not so terrible a thing, after all."

"Oh, how can you _say_ that?" she agonized.

Sighing softly, he gathered her into his arms. "You think of this as a death, but it is meant to be a chance for life. Perhaps I shall find someone with the means to cure me… but I do so without burdening the rest of the tribe."

"But--"

"God shall protect you even as he protects this Court, and he shall be your strength," he said. "I do not know much of the One God -- he seems to show himself infinitely more to those who twist his words as Frollo does than to us. All I know of him is that he guards us on this earth in his own way, and that I will someday go to be with him elsewhere; and if that day were tomorrow, I gather that once all is said and done I shall not mind it. My happiness shall be great after death, so my only concern is for your happiness and safety, and even these he will look after. If you allow him."

Gently caressing her shoulder, he whispered to her, "The gypsies will need your cool head even more after I am gone. Don't let Frollo get them… or you." With a kiss to her hair, he left the fireside, making his way to his tent -- not wishing her to see him weeping. He did not weep for himself, for though he loved life he was not afraid of death so long as it came in such a natural manner, nor did he find it favorable to prolong and cling to life indefinitely. Nay, he wept for his love, who would suffer greatly when he had left her behind. Maria had lately been plagued by doubts about just why God was allowing such horrors to be visited upon the gypsies. Clopin could not answer such questions to her satisfaction; Maria simply could not accept faith as an answer to such things.

Tears trailed into his goatee as he went through his things one last time. He had given away most of them earlier that day. There was nothing that he truly wanted to take with him, for he could not lug a life behind him. The long walk was ahead -- no! not to Heaven's Gate, but to the provision of fateful occurrences. Clopin's people -- not the gypsies, but those he had chosen to become a part of while he was yet a youth, and that is a different tale -- had a way, that when they grew sick enough to die, if they could still walk, they left. It was not a journey to death, although it most often lead to it: It was a journey to find a cure. The dying man would walk as far as he could, and, sometimes, rare as it was, his steps would carry him to someone who could do more than the village's healer could. This was taken as a sign that the man was to live rather than die, and he would usually stay with the one who saved his life. Sometimes the illness went away on its own, during the course of the journey, and if so the man was free to choose whether to continue on or return to his old home.

Clopin could not but feel that, shortly, he could not consider the Court his home anymore.

* * *

Making his way out a back passage to the Court, with no one spying his journey's beginning, he entered the forest and found himself beside a stream. The cool air comforted his hot, aching chest. He knelt beside the stream on the moss, and splashed clear water on his face. Immediately his head took on an ache, and he pulled off his shirt to wipe the freezing water off.

In the pain of a thousand aches, too many to name, that this sickness brought on, Clopin wandered downstream, far down through the forest until finally he came to the edge, where it overlooked a large valley. He had never been so far in that direction. Somewhere along the way he let go of his shirt, but though it crossed his mind once or twice he brushed away the thought easily. Shivers came as the cold night air brushed his back like a lover's caress.

Involuntarily he thought of Maria. She had left everything in her life, and now he too had left her. Her ostracism had been far worse than that suffered by most gypsies; for her "crime" she had been branded across the cheek and shoulder and sent away. No one had given her food, water, shelter, or kindness for all the long days she had traveled from the land of her birth to Paris. Finally she had reached the Court of Miracles and fallen, exhausted, straight into Clopin's surprised arms. He had taken her under his wing, though he had never learnt what crime she had been punished for, and soon after her arrival they had become closer than friends. The few times he had mentioned his desire for her, she had shied away, saying that she would not join with him while her crime remained a secret, yet she was unwilling to disclose it even to him. After a time he had stopped asking, and simply enjoyed their love. Now he left her behind, left everything behind.

_Well_ , he thought, _it's not as if I'm completely sure I'm going to die. There's still life in this body, even if it's being beaten out by illness. I'll fight until I am gone. However_ \-- he noted with asperity -- _I could do with another shirt right now_. Shivers racked his body, which made him give in to another spell of coughing. _If I didn't know better, I'd think someone put a curse on me_ , he thought ruefully. _At this rate, I won't make morning._

The coughing eventually stopped, and he got wearily to his feet, trudging along for he was by no means up to his usual jaunty, skipping stride. Several times during the night's journey he coughed up phlegm, and each time was disgusted with the way his insides seemed to be losing the battle they fought. He didn't know much about the way his body worked, but he knew that he felt awful, and that told him that he was probably going to lose, in the end. He'd never been this sick before, and he _had_ taken ill enough times to experience the depths of illness. By all his experience he knew that his body was not going to win without help -- and where to find the help, if even the Healer had sadly given up?

After Clopin had followed the stream for a good hour, it panned off into a small lake, its glistening water reflecting… the moon? He looked up -- he hadn't even seen the moon tonight, for dark clouds had been all around; but not a drop of rain had fallen, and the air near the ground was still, though the clouds in their higher currents had blown away leaving a clear night sky. Now the moon shown bright and clear across the valley, illuminating the loveliness around him -- waving grasses, shining rocks, silvery trees, and the lake most of all.

He found himself wading in, stripped of trousers and shoes and hat, and in the frigid water he swam until the burning in his chest was gone, replaced with a shivery feeling he didn't like but couldn't quite place; it quieted his coughs at least. Finally he got out and let the air dry him slowly, blessing the cool relief to his feverish body. Feelings and worries fell away, so that he could not even wonder what the cold would do to his weakened defenses. Dressing again simply that he not leave his clothes behind, he walked around the lake, taking in every detail of the landscape. He broke into coughs a few times more as he stumbled along, and he wrapped his thin arms around his bare chest, trying to hold them in. He would have preferred a belt or something to tie around his chest, as tight as he could make it, squeezing until there was no more room for coughs or aches at all. He sneezed, and sneezed again, and the night's cold caught up to him as he fell to the earth inches from the water, shaking with cold, oblivious to his surroundings and soon too far gone to care anyway.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here's the other part I had written, back in the day. Again, this is never going to be finished; this is the sum total of what it will be.
> 
> I've worked the prose a bit so it's less painful to read (for me, at least), but this is an example of just following the flow of thoughts without having much in the way of a goal… or conflict. And little sense of how a person in the wilderness might actually act.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I once got a sunburn bad enough to keep me in bed for a week, and my skin sopped up the aloe vera gel faster than my mom could put it on. I also went into shock, for the first and only time in my life.
> 
> So I'm kinda surprised that I seem to think Clopin doesn't need any protection from the sun. Maybe I was figuring that people with darker skin are immune to sunburn?
> 
> Not the only weirdness here: Apparently a sick-to-the-point-of-dying man can live on unripe wild strawberries for nearly a month with no ill effects. Seems legit.

Miraculously, he lived through the night, and he woke softly to sunbeams tickling his face. Because the ground was so cold, he at first thought himself in Frollo's dungeon, and sat up with alarm, but found only that he was still at the lake.

No one was nearby. Sunbeams wafted pure and true toward his bare back and shoulders, and he warmed quickly. He sighed; it felt wonderful. He rubbed his face, then the rest of his aching body; then he hunched over a little and simply let the sun work its natural magic, cleansing and warming him through and through. As one part got warm, he turned to let it warm another part, slowly attending to every side of him. While it warmed his chest, he stared out across the lake and over the valley to the east -- and there was a scene wholly different from that of the night before.

The lake had changed into choppy waters teeming with fish, for no fisherman had ever set foot in this prairie. While stumbling to the lake, Clopin had not spotted a single animal, but now huge, strange birds flocked to the waters to catch their fill of fish; he had never seen birds fish before, and watched them with some amusement. They seemed oblivious to the human in their midst, but even flapped within inches of his head, and landed but a few feet away from him. There were frogs leaping into and out of the water, and some of these found their way into the birds' gullets, but most were swift enough to avoid capture. Insects chirped in the grasses, and many fell prey to the frogs in their turn. A grasshopper jumped onto Clopin's hand; he stared at it, amused, and it took off again, its powerful legs carrying it very close to the water's edge. As a frog leaped for it, it took off into the air and with a whir of wings avoided the attack.

Studying the water, Clopin saw strange shapes moving below its surface; making a shadow with his hands, he finally saw them clearly. There were large brownish-red things that looked something like a small version of a lobster, something he had seen a few times but never had occasion to eat -- only rich men ate lobster, and it more behooved the poor who caught them to sell them than to eat them. For a moment, Clopin considered catching one of the lobster-like creatures, for his stomach _was_ rather empty, but he was turned aside by the crawfish's vicious attack on a small fish. The movement rocked the water, and when finally it cleared again, the crawfish was eating the fish, holding it in its claws.

Clopin rued that he had neither puppet nor audience, for that could have sparked a lively comment from his little counterpart. But the day before he had bequeathed his puppet collection, including his favorite look-alike, to little Jerome, whose growing skill would someday allow him to rise as a puppet master and greet audiences of adults as well as those of children. For a moment, Clopin's thoughts were clouded with unhappiness, but he shook it off and turned his back to the water so the life-giving sun could again warm it.

He looked out over the prairie to the horizon, noticing more about his hat than the scenery -- the brim was bent! He pulled it off and went about fixing it. At length, he looked the feather over and sadly discarded the thing, being too bent to even hope of fixing. Then he replaced the cap jauntily and with a renewed sense of properness gazed over the valley.

On the far side were hills, a long journey to the northwest, if he had his directions right. Paris was far behind him -- south-ish, but he wasn't sure exactly how he had wandered the part night, either in terms of direction or distance. His head was clear now, and his feelings high, for his body felt good at the moment and he looked forward to the adventure ahead, rather than the past he was leaving or the remaining effects of his illness. To the east were more hills, but they seemed farther off; completely north, the land lay flat as the ocean -- he had once seen the ocean while on a journey. No journey could match this one, though, and there was only one thing that kept him from starting on it immediately -- he was _starving_!

He had already identified the pond residents as either inedible or uncatchable, and, even if he _could_ catch the fish, he had nothing to cook them with. The birds, though they found him as something less than an enemy, scooted away when he moved, and he didn't think they would be any better raw than the fish would. Besides, he didn't relish getting pecked, and he didn't really want to get his knife bloody when he'd spent an entire night polishing it last week. The grasshoppers, filled with more food value than most Westerners would credit them, did not really seem like a meal, and he was not willing to chase them all over the prairie in order to catch enough to make a breakfast. He truly wished he'd brought something to eat with him, but preparations for the journey he was making rarely included food, since you were looking for a place to die or be healed anyway.

In the end, he abandoned even the idea of digging up tubers, for he wasn't all too sure which were edible and which not, and he wasn't going to spoil his knife for something that might poison him. He went on his way, walking toward the northeastern hills at a reasonable rate of speed, with an empty stomach, a nose that was beginning to drip, and a slight scowl on his face -- but the last was soon removed by the warmth of the sun. Even Clopin couldn't keep his anger on a day like this, where freedom was all around him and he could stroll through flower-filled fields unassaulted by soldiers and unbothered by his people's problems and demands. The ground wasn't exactly soft through the leather soles of his shoes, but at least while discarding his shirt he had kept his shoes, so his feet were protected somewhat. He was rather happy that he _had_ left his shirt behind, for he didn't have to ruin its sleeves by tying them around his waist, yet he could still bare his back to the sun rather than block its warmth by fabric. His coughing had abated during the night, though his chest still contracted now and again. The aches and pains weren't gone, but the sunlight and rest had restored his body and spirit; he found new hope for the uncertain future.

* * *

His steps carried him to the first hill just as the morning ended and the sun no longer touched the horizon. Steeling himself not to look back, he kept his gaze focused ahead, to the valley below him and the hills beyond it. Some were bigger, some small, but the end of the day found him far from the Court of Miracles and deep in an unending country he did not well know. It made him a little nervous to think that there was no practiced escape path near him, but he turned that thought over -- there were no guards, either. So he cared little for his fears as he went, and discarded new ones, too, when the night came. During the dark he still traveled -- it was light enough to see well, for the moon was above him in a near-full phase, and he did not feel very tired. The night passed as easily as the day, but he traveled twice as far when the light of the sun gave him vigor. Although the night seemed warmer than the last -- perhaps because he hadn't dipped himself in an ice-cold creek -- it was still cold enough to bring back his coughs, but they were weaker than before and did not bother him as much.

When daylight came again, he had almost reached his limit, but a nap in the thick grasses revived him again, and he was underway before much time elapsed. The weather stayed fine for the next day, and the next, and though he was getting more hungry than ever, he still found the strength to go on. Without so much sleep, he found that the only comfort he needed was that of the sun's light and heat. Nevertheless, the days without food finally caught up to him, and he found himself searching the valley he currently occupied for anything even remotely resembling something edible. He found a funny furry thing in the grasses, not unlike a rabbit but with short ears and a longer tail, that sat upon its hind legs until he neared it; then it bounded out of sight. He tracked it down to a hole, and sat patiently by the den… for about five minutes. Then patience left him, and he set out to search for a different meal; and he would have sworn that as he left he heard a short, barking laugh from behind him.

There were the same insects here as by the lake, but when he finally managed to catch one he accidentally squashed it too, making an unappetizing meal even to his starving stomach, and bringing a dark scowl to his face. There were birds around, too, and since there was no water here they were not the large birds he'd seen at the lake. Still, the tiny birds proved faster than the larger ones, too quick for him even when he tried various tricks to catch them, and his scowl deepened. He didn't see any other types of animals to hunt, and he admittedly wasn't doing all that well at hunting, so he plopped himself down on the grasses to contemplate.

That was when he came across what was to be his sole sustenance for long days to come.

Something under him squashed, and he bolted to his feet angrily, wiping off the seat of his pants and hoping that whatever he had killed had suffered greatly in that moment before death. The indignity to his pants! Weren't they dirty enough? He didn't even have a way to wash them!

Instead of insect remains, though, his hand appeared with something lightly pink, with tiny seeds in it and a very fruity smell. He leaned over and scrutinized what he'd sat on. The plant looked very familiar…

"Strawberries!" he exclaimed through parched lips. Then, as he wondered vaguely if he'd destroyed the only food in the area, his questing eyes picked out numerous such plants amid the short, dry grasses of the area. They weren't ripe yet, but he eagerly deprived the bushes of their harvest, and to his tongue they were sweeter than honey. When finally he sat down -- in a carefully chosen spot where he wasn't going to spoil any more of the plants (or his pants) -- he dusted off his knees and leaned back lazily with sticky juices running down into his goatee. He thought back to all the days he'd been walking -- he recalled spotting white things in the grass, but had not thought them interesting enough to examine. He'd walked for nearly a week, starving, with food all around him -- probably squashing food at every other step! Ruefully, he made himself a light proposal to check things out more carefully in future.

After a short nap, as was his wont in such blissful sunshine, and even more enjoyable due to his stomach being full for the first time in a week, he filled his hat with white strawberries, never minding the stains they would make. He walked on, snacking on them here and there. Beneath his beard, his chin began to itch from the drying juice, but he didn't much mind. His skin was starting to peel, and the back of his head felt uncomfortably hot now that he was not wearing a hat, but he disregarded those things too. For now, life was good.

The days passed better now that he had food. Then, one day he found himself at the top of a rather large hill overlooking a valley with… people! People living in tents, walking around, carting water from the stream, caring for the cattle and sheep that filled up a good corner of the place, sitting around an area burnt black from campfires. Clopin laughed aloud as he saw them. Of course, that set him to coughing again, but it quieted down in minutes and he made his way down the steep hill into the camp.

Altogether, Clopin had traveled for three weeks and five days.

**Author's Note:**

> There's one more chapter of this, which I hope to upload later today (gotta hand over the computer right now). But it is, and will remain, an unfinished fic -- a snapshot in the history of me as a writer, back when I was just opening my eyes to the rest of the world and its tremendous array of cultures.
> 
> Also, apparently I was trying to drive up interest in my fics by making weird things on my webpage. Like a secret page where I posted parts of fics before I was quite ready for them -- hence this line in the document I've got saved:
> 
>  
> 
> _Section Two UP! On my Rough Drafts Secret Page! If you haven't won a contest yet, by all means go and try!_


End file.
